First Words
by Gondawara Saburota
Summary: On the third day of summer vacation, Axel met Roxas. On that same day, he realized what his first word had been. [AUish, AkuRoku]


**Disclaimer:** I own Kingdom Hearts. Oh, wait, add a "don't" in there.

**Author's notes:**  
-One-shot! This's all there is. And this is sort of an experiment in style for me. I wrote the majority of the piece about a year ago, but had trouble finishing it until recently.  
-AU-ish. The events of KH and KH2 happened, just not in this lifetime.  
-The basic drill: Contains AkuRoku. That means Axel/Roxas. If you don't like male/male pairings, don't read it! If you don't like Kingdom Hearts, why are you here?

—

**First Words**

—

According to his parents, Axel's first word was "rocks" and his second was "fire." But on the third day of summer vacation, Axel _knew_ that they were wrong. His first word hadn't been "rocks." It had been "Roxas."

Not that he could really blame them for the mistake... They didn't know, after all. They didn't know that Roxas was sixteen and had golden hair and bright blue eyes and worked at the ice cream parlor downtown. When Axel saw him, he hadn't even had to ask the boy's name. He just _knew_ that it was Roxas, and the nametag displaying the boy's name in big bold letters had nothing to do with it.

Axel had stood in awe of Roxas and contemplating his first word for a good twenty minutes before Roxas begrudgingly confronted him with a "Can I help you?"

Never let it be said that Axel was not a smooth customer. He shot back immediately with "What was your first word?"

Well, that hadn't been _exactly_ what he meant to say...

Roxas blinked and raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

"Your first word," Axel clarified. It had been said, and he never took back anything he said. "When you were a baby."

"Oh. Probably 'mom' or 'dad' or 'no' or something like that, I guess." Roxas shifted, and started playing with the pens kept in a cup by the cash register.

"Oh." Axel busied himself with looking at the ice cream the shop had out, trying to pretend that his first meeting with Roxas had gone better, and he almost missed the soft question of "Why?"

"Huh?" Never let it be said that Axel was not eloquent, either.

"Why do you want to know?" Roxas asked as he stopped fiddling with the pens. He was looking everywhere other than Axel, and Axel _noticed_.

"Oh. Survey. For school."

Roxas looked at him, raising an eyebrow again. "Isn't school out?"

Axel blinked. Third day of summer vacation; _right_. "Summer homework." Never mind that he'd just graduated high school, and wasn't starting college until the fall... At least Roxas bought the explanation with a quiet "Ah" and didn't think Axel was crazy. Or had a fetish for speech development.

Because he didn't. Not really.

Axel ordered his ice cream and ate it in the store and watched how Roxas didn't watch him. And when he had one foot out the door, Roxas spoke to him again.

"If you come by tomorrow, I can ask my parents tonight," he said, looking away. "About what my first word was, I mean."

Axel smiled and nodded. And when he came back the next day, he was a bit disappointed that Roxas's first word had been "shell" and his brother Sora's first word had been "key," but that was okay because his first word had been "Roxas."

—

Roxas liked sleep, but he didn't like sleeping. Because whenever he was sleeping, he dreamed.

They were dark dreams, full of fighting and ink-black creatures with glowing eyes and an emptiness that ate away inside of him. More often than not, he woke up shouting and in a cold sweat, and his brother would run into his room and tell him that it was okay, that everything was okay.

The dreams got worse after he met Axel. After he met Axel, fire was always licking at the edges of the dreams, sometimes exploding once it built up too much and sometimes tearing down dark streets. He'd be burning up when he woke suddenly and Sora had more worry in his voice when he tried to tell Roxas that everything was okay.

But even though the dreams were worse, it really _was_ okay, because Axel would come to the shop every day and order ice cream. Roxas would have claimed that eating so much ice cream was bad for him, but Axel was stick-skinny, so the ice cream obviously didn't do much. Roxas also would have claimed that Axel was addicted to ice cream, but the claim of "addiction" was reserved solely for the parlor's owner, who was rumored to keep a vault full of sea-salt ice cream in the basement of his mansion. So Roxas just smiled whenever Axel ordered his ice cream and would sometimes join him if it were time for his break.

Before he knew it, Axel was his best friend.

—

Axel sometimes wondered why he'd never run into Roxas before. He finally asked after a month of coming to the ice cream parlor, and Roxas told him that they'd moved there from some nearby islands at the end of the school year. He'd been hired right away by the ice cream parlor because the owner was an old friend of Roxas's uncle Mickey. The day Axel had met Roxas had been his first day.

Axel smiled and believed in fate.

—

When Roxas became friends with Hayner, Pence, and Olette, he stopped working extra shifts at the shop, and sometimes he would miss Axel's daily visit. When that happened, he'd find Axel on the hill later and they'd eat ice cream together and watch the sunset. Sometimes others would come to the hill for the sunset, and he and Axel would go to the clock tower at the station instead. It was there, at the top of the tower one day late in the summer, that Roxas had his first kiss.

Axel had finished his ice cream quickly that day, but Roxas had been eating his more slowly than usual. Axel had said something particularly amusing, but Roxas quickly forgot what it was because when he looked up at his friend, Axel bent over and kissed him.

Roxas had been dazed at first, surprised by the feeling of Axel's lips on his. But once his wits returned to him, he pulled away, muttered some excuse involving Hayner, Pence, and Olette, and turned.

And then he ran.

—

Axel didn't like days that he didn't see Roxas.

Ever since he'd kissed the boy during the sunset, those days had been increasing. Heck, "increasing" didn't even cover it; he'd seen Roxas _every day_ after meeting the boy, but after he'd stupidly got it in his head to _kiss him_, he hadn't seen Roxas at all. He would go to the ice cream parlor every day, but he never managed to catch Roxas at work. He'd go to the hill to find his friend at sunset, but Roxas never came. After a week of never seeing the boy, Axel had arrived at the parlor early in the morning and stayed until they closed and _still_ didn't see Roxas. So he asked about it, only to find out that Roxas had requested time off, for "personal reasons."

Desperately hoping that "personal reasons" didn't translate to "avoiding Axel," he set about finding his friend. If Roxas didn't want him around, he was going to have to tell him. He couldn't just disappear.

It didn't take much effort to find out that Roxas's friends had taken over a corner of the alleys, and it took even less to find out which corner it was. Axel plopped down on a couch that was in their usual spot and waited.

He didn't remember falling asleep, but the next thing he knew, he was on the main street again, nursing a bruised cheek and bruised ego (courtesy of a brunette who couldn't seem to decide if she wanted to yell or cry) and being threatened by an angry blond boy.

Axel really wasn't sure what the angry boy had said, but they were Roxas's friends, and their message had been pretty clear: _stay away from Roxas_.

So he did... even though it killed him a little more every day.

—

Roxas hated sleeping. His dreams got darker every night, and gradually, Sora's words were no longer enough to calm him. Sometimes he would have a good dream, a dream about ice cream and sunsets and friends, but most of the dreams were upsetting. He would be running, running, always running from some_thing_, some_one_... He would stop fighting and leave, and when he left, he would leave someone behind, even though walking away hurt so _much_. And sometimes that someone would find him and they would become enemies and he would have to fight again... Fire was always tearing through the dreams and through his body, until sometimes the dreams would change and he would dream of fire and searing kisses and skin against skin.

He never remembered the dreams any more, not fully. He would wake with a vague idea of what had happened in them and a burning desire to see Axel...

Roxas hadn't seen Axel in a month, not since he'd been kissed. He knew he was somehow running out of time. Summer vacation was almost over.

He'd woken from a particularly bad dream; the someone from his dreams, the one he'd fought and loved and made a promise to... that_ someone_ had died to protect someone else that Roxas both was and wasn't... He'd woken from the dream, and before Sora could even make it to his room, Roxas was gone.

It didn't take him long to get to Axel's house, and he soon found himself throwing acorns at the redhead's window. Axel had seemed annoyed at being woken, but he was outside in a heartbeat when he saw that it had been Roxas.

This time, Roxas was the one to kiss Axel.

—

Normally, one would be concerned when a sibling disappeared in the middle of the night. But when Sora ran into Roxas's room and found it empty, he wasn't worried at all. Because he _knew_.

He knew that Roxas's dreams were filled with keyblades and fighting and Heartless and Nobodies... because so were his own dreams.

But unlike Roxas, Sora had known for a long time what his own dreams held. He'd known what he was fighting for in them, he'd known who he was looking for in them. And he'd already found them again, in the islands he'd had to leave behind at the beginning of the summer: Kairi and Riku...

Roxas didn't know why they'd left the islands, but Sora did: they'd left so that Roxas could find who he was looking for, too. And seeing Roxas's room empty after one of the nightmares, Sora knew that Roxas had finally remembered who he'd been and who _he_ was: the boy that had appeared once in his own dreams, the one who had died to save them both.

Smiling, he dialed a familiar number. When a sleepy voice answered, Sora said simply, "They've found each other. Everything's going to be okay."

He would tell Roxas about his own dreams now, and afterwards, maybe Sora would tell him something else, as well. His brother had asked at the beginning of summer what his first word had been, after all. As far as their parents were concerned, it had been "shell," but Sora knew differently.

Roxas's first word had been "Axel."

**-Fin-**


End file.
